


shake your head and scatter day

by Crazyamoeba



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Angry Will Graham, Bisexuality, Dark Will Graham, Discussion of Cannibalism, Hair, Hair-pulling, Hannibal Lecter Loves Will Graham, M/M, Mood Swings, Possessive Behavior, Post-Fall (Hannibal), Will Graham Loves Hannibal Lecter, Will Graham has anger issues, Will has a mild obsession with Hannibal's hair, brief allusions to Will Graham accepting that he's not straight, effects of incarceration
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-22
Updated: 2020-08-22
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:48:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26043754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crazyamoeba/pseuds/Crazyamoeba
Summary: Will figures that he gave the world a chance to be rid of them when he took them both over the cliff. It wasted that chance, and now Will feels like he is perfectly justified in surrendering to what is his.Or: Will Graham has a mild obsession with Hannibal's hair, and with the changes that incarceration wrought on Hannibal.
Relationships: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 5
Kudos: 24





	shake your head and scatter day

Will wasn’t sure when it had happened, or how long it had taken to identify the feeling. Logically, he knows that it must have happened slowly by degrees, but all he remembers was being so suddenly struck by a sharp sense of ownership that he had wanted to push Chiyoh into the roiling darkness below them. 

Perhaps he could still pretend that it was about payback for the train, and not those hungry, snapping teeth inside him that he feared would never be silent now that they had tasted cold night air and sea salt, mingling together in the coppery aftermath of victory.

He hadn’t even been aware of moving until he had devoured half the ground between himself and where Chiyoh and Hannibal stood on deck, quietly conferring about their course. He had woken suddenly with his feet still carrying him forcefully, smoothly towards those proud backs, and the full-body jolt he had experienced had only propelled him further, faster, and made his breath come harder and his mouth water with anticipation as he stared at Chiyoh’s vulnerable back, the distraction of Hannibal himself oddly and momentarily shelved as less important than getting rid of one whom Will didn’t want to share it with.

He had caught up with himself just in time to force aching, hungry bones to pivot, to duck behind Hannibal and use him as a human shield against his own inhumanity.

And so now, quivering unreasonably for such a light rain, he takes a parting shot at Hannibal as he rams his shoulder against the man’s chest on his quest to hide behind him and duck inside the cabin. Hannibal staggers half a step back but is otherwise unmoved, and he probably wouldn’t have even given that much if not for the Dragon’s wounds.

Good. Will hopes it hurts. And not only because he had used his own injured shoulder to impart the blow. Let Hannibal hurt. This was all his fault anyway. If he didn’t want to defang the creature he had nurtured, he deserved to feel the rending of skin.

“Will?”

Will stops in the entry of the cabin, not needing to go any further seeing as it wasn’t the really cabin’s protection that he had sought. He never had found a shelter more all-encompassing than Hannibal’s shadow, and he’ll be damned if he’s going to let anything stop him from standing in it now.

“No,” he hisses, flinching away from Hannibal as he turns from Chiyo to curve around the space Will has forced himself into. He stands, swaying a little, back turned to Hannibal but his head tilted back just enough to see the shape of the man in his peripheral vision.

Hannibal stops in his attempt to lean down into Will’s space, and Will snarls at the loss of the opportunity to have Hannibal tilt his head down to Will’s level in the way that told Will that he was listening intently to everything that Will or his body had to say.

He tries to tame himself. That isn’t what he needs right now.

Hannibal peers at him through the doorway of the cabin, the watery light of the afternoon bending around his head and making it difficult to see the expression on his face.

“No,” Will spits again. Chiyoh kept her face turned towards the ocean, her back a straight line.

“Alright,” Hannibal agrees calmly. The pause that follows tells Will that he’s running his eyes up and down Will’s body, listening as only he can. “Sit down, then. It will help.”

“Fuck off.”

“Good boy.”

Will glares at the back of Hannibal’s retreating head - fingers itching with the need to touch, to tangle into that flat, dull hair that makes Will’s throat burn and his eyes ache to see now, and tug and yank and  _ pull _ as hard as he possibly can. Because he thinks that it is his right now, to plunge his fingers through everything that Hannibal has and pull and  _ pull  _ until he unravels every part of Hannibal from inside out, like ribbons that he can wrap around himself to hold himself together. To make a gift of themselves to each other, to bind his body with Hannibal’s. 

Scowling at Hannibal’s back, he throws his still-aching body to fold onto one of the small padded benches recessed into the cabin. He tries to soothe himself with the promise that Hannibal will finish whatever business he has with Chiyoh, and then he will return to Will. He will always return to Will, and then he will be free to touch and hold and  _ have.  _ There must be no escape for Hannibal that isn’t Will. He will keep and cherish Hannibal far better than Alana ever did.

Will often wonders why the FBI didn’t just give Hannibal to Will in the first place. It would have been so much better for everyone.

It aches in the dark and brittle centre of his bones when he remembers that he hadn’t been ready, then. Hannibal had been ready to give Will the keys, and oh, how Will had wanted to take them, to lock himself and Hannibal inside and away, away from everyone else in some little corner of their own choosing. Caught only by each other, the tail and the head of the snake finally meeting and welcoming each other into their dark, wet places.

He hadn’t been ready.

Will’s hands find their way to his neck to scratch at the place where he feels that insistent itch, the hot pleasure-pain of new growth, where Hannibal had first broken into him, pierced him and began to slowly fuse with his nerves. Rearranged the careful placement of all of the things Will had hidden inside himself, moved all the furniture in the dark that Will had insisted on for so long. Watching with eyes flashing ember-bright and pleased in the dark as Will tripped and stumbled over things that he desperately tried to pretend he had never placed there, that he did not recognise.

Will’s fingers catch onto the soft curls at the nape of his neck and yank in frustration at his willful blindness. Of how he had covered his ears against the soft, soothing whispers that urged him to turn the light on and see the beauty of what he had hidden.

A treasure hunt, except Hannibal had only come bearing light that had hurt at first. He hadn’t brought his own treasure, he had simply helped Will to find his own. Will’s lips twitch. Curl suddenly into a snarl when Hannibal’s warm, calloused hand twines its way into his hair and forces Will’s fingers to release their grip.

“Get  _ off. _ ” He yanks his hand in Hannibal’s grip just to feel it maintain its hold, while his other creeps back up to his neck to rub and scratch at the entry point.

He spits out a noise that he hopes substitutes for a decent curse when Hannibal respects Will’s wishes and releases his wrist from his grip. Will just about manages to keep his own hand from slamming back into his face, the force that Hannibal had effortlessly been keeping at bay almost enough to break his own nose.

“You  _ bastard. _ ”

Finding that curse after all, Will cradles the offending wrist to his chest as though it’s suffered some great injury, and with the way that Will’s skin burns with only the short memory of Hannibal’s touch, Will’s not entirely convinced that it hasn’t.

He remembers the sensation of those fingers gently engulfing his hand. He remembers the sting of losing it, licking all over his skin like someone - Jack, maybe, or Alana, or that fucking prosecutor that Will had wanted to strangle with his bare, aching hands - had doused oil over him and set him alight. He can say with utmost honesty that he has had enough of it. Three years of it. Three years of trying to ignore it, trying to pretend that it was a normal sensation that was due to the particularly cold winter they’d had, or the unusually dry summer, or the new detergent that Molly had bought.

Molly. Two years of trying to use her touch to soothe that fire, to bank it just enough for Will to be able to go a single day without trying to remember - sometimes for a few, fleeting seconds and sometimes for blank, lost hours at a time - where on his body Hannibal had touched him before Jack Crawford’s hands had ripped them into Before and After.

In his dreams, sometimes, the Ripper takes the form of Jack Crawford, and Will wakes up with horror between his teeth and his hands protectively cradling the opening that Hannibal had left in his belly.

It was like trying to remember the exact day that he had gone outside to play for the last time as a child. The sliver of the memory taunts him with the knowledge that it is there, somewhere, but will be forever lost to him outside of the hours when he feels like lying to himself, when he could swear up and down that he remembers the exact second, like a red-eyed sailor who swears that he heard the Sirens sing.

Some days he was convinced that it was his hand or his wrist, while other days he couldn’t be swayed from the conviction that it had been a gentle, supportive hand on the back of his neck.

“Don’t you fucking dare,” he bares his teeth at Hannibal, stands and widens his stance as he had when he had prepared to throw himself at the Dragon’s soft, exposed belly.

Hannibal smiles, and it’s soft and gentle as it always has been for him, and Will’s whole body jolts forward in an abortive move wrenched straight from his gut.

“It is not mine to dare anymore, Will. I have everything that I want. The rest now lies with you,” Hannibal murmurs, disgustingly soft and  _ content,  _ and Will’s breath starts to leave him in great heaving, shuddering wetness. His whole body quivers, enraged and utterly besotted by how Hannibal can gild such deliberately cruel misunderstanding with such tenderness.

Hannibal crosses in front of Will, eyes fixed calmly on him like he might do something beautifully heinous or simply, finally fall apart, and lowers himself to the opposite bench. Will’s eyes track the movement of Hannibal’s right hand, sharp and instant as light on a blade, as it slowly reaches out to pat the space next to him.

The air around them seems as still as the air caught in Will’s throat as he waits for those beloved, cruel hands to do something else, to take something from him that he is finally ready to be taken. 

But that angular, steady hand does nothing more than settle one final, gently inviting pat on the seat beside him, and then fold in his lap with its twin, utterly still and seemingly content to remain empty of Will’s insides. Will’s eyes flash as he takes in the sight, lip yanking upwards into a snarl like a fish caught on a hook.

Hannibal doesn’t so much as flinch when Will darts forward, shoves both hands into Hannibal’s belly, twisting the material of his shirt like his stomach twisted itself around his emptiness. Hannibal uses one hand to brace himself against the seat, and the other he rests on Will’s shoulder, encouraging his fury further into his own warmth with as much tenderness as a mother with a hungry newborn.

“You’re a fucking  _ monster. _ ” Will chokes, wet like blood between teeth, and shoves his face into Hannibal’s chest, keeping the rest of his body as far away as possible from his own frantic, sickly nuzzling. “Have the decency to be monstrous _.  _ Don’t give me my choice, I don’t fucking want it. What would I do with it anymore, other than give it to you?”

Hannibal makes no effort to loosen the fingers digging and searching within the softness of his belly, still not quite returned to its former state after three years of whatever exercise he could fashion from within his cell. He strokes up and down Will’s heaving back, feels the sweat as it soaks through Will’s shirt with the same ease as it had when Hannibal had so tenderly stoked the flames of infection. He allows himself a small rueful smile at the memory of the exquisite pain that had lanced through him when those fires had burnt out and left the design scorched into the floor of his memory palace.

It hadn’t quite been the one he had set out to create. Or perhaps it had been, and he simply wasn’t prepared to mourn the inevitable loss of his medium as much as he had. He’s careful to press the shape of his smile tenderly into Will’s hair. 

Their finished piece is one of great beauty that he can’t bring himself to regret. He still allows himself the occasional lamentations for some of the brushstrokes that had brought them here. 

“Only tell me what you would have from me.” 

Hannibal presses the words in a kiss to Will’s damp temple, uncurling as much as he’s able for Will’s clawed, blunt fingers. Offering up the open wound of his love with no defences. He wanted none against Will’s gaze or his searching fingers, digging ever deeper and then freezing, Will keening at how easily he finds it there after so many years. So much blood under their bridge, burnt and battered and still standing. Falling apparently not a part of its design.

“The shape of us is yours to carve, Will.”

Will chokes, stiffening against Hannibal’s easy hold which feels somehow like waiting, like potential, and Will has no more use for either of those things. He had thrown everything he had down into the plunging darkness, and it hadn’t smashed against the rocks or been swallowed by the roiling black, and that meant that it was _his._ He had given the world its chance to be rid of Them, and it had spat Them back out, and so now They were all _his._ _His_ to hold, _his_ to have and protect and lock away from the rest of the world. He had _earned Them._

“You’re disgusting,” he breathes the promise through his teeth, presses them against Hannibal’s skin, forcing himself further into Hannibal’s hold as the man gathers him close. Encourages Will’s teeth to find the soft, tender flesh of his neck and bite down, impart all of him beneath Hannibal’s skin. His throat works stiffly to expel the ragged sounds trapped in his lungs with the salt water, and Hannibal pats his back lovingly, firmly, just as he had when he had dragged Will to the beach and forced those last, brackish drops of an ill-fitting loneliness from his lungs, to be left wet and useless on the sand. 

“You want to  _ hear me  _ say it even though I’ve given you everything I have and everything I’ll ever be. You always manage to find just one more thing, don’t you? I want -” he chokes and for a moment, he expects to perhaps cough up a sharp and shining dragon scale. “I want you to sit still. Let me - ”

Hannibal blinks in mild surprise and Will expects it to feel like a victory, but it lands soft and easy inside all his opened spaces. It doesn’t catch on any of those hungry, sharp pieces of him that cling to his skin, left over from where he and Hannibal have torn Will Graham from the chrysalis with their teeth.

He lets the enormity of the thought that they may be beyond petty losses and victories sink quietly into the dark, because he has more pressing matters to attend to.

Matters such as forcing Hannibal to bend his head into his lap, even though the man goes swiftly and willingly, eyes alight with tenderness that does nothing to bank the hungry curiosity that dances behind them. 

Matters such as encircling Hannibal’s head with both hands and simply holding this, his everything, his whole, brave world in his trembling, battered hands, and letting the terror wash over him at just how  _ fragile  _ it all is. 

It’s not a word that Will has ever associated with Hannibal before, not even when viewed through the lense of Hannibal’s smudged, stale fishbowl. Hannibal is graceful and towering, looming above any and all else. Tall and broad-shouldered, hidden strength coiled beneath the tapered waists and pristine suits. Fearful dexterity and terrible, awful intelligence hidden pleasantly away beneath genial smiles. So quick to lash out and retract back behind harmless teeth that people had no idea of the damage that had been done until later.

Hannibal is fearless, peerless, and Will has never been more aware of his fragility than at this moment, and he  _ hates  _ Hannibal for daring to be a mere mortal after all.

“Will -”

“Shut  _ up,”  _ he spits the words, wet like mourning, curls his body over Hannibal as he lies placidly in Will’s lap, rocks forward and then back, once. “Be quiet, or I swear to god, I’ll crush you.” 

Because he  _ could _ . He could simply….break Hannibal’s skull like those fragile, featherless things that Bedelia had taunted him with. 

He probably couldn’t do it just like this, with his hands. But for all Hannibal’s strength, it  _ is _ physically possible for his head to be bounced off the floor, the table, the side of the boat, and his skull would crack and splinter just like the next man’s, just like Will’s, and Will is  _ furious. _

“Is this how it felt to you? Did it hurt so much? God, it’s - I can’t stand it, Hannibal. Is this what I did to you?”

“I have experienced a beautiful spectrum of pain throughout our time together, Will. You will need to be a little more specific.” Barely one soft second between Will’s demand and Hannibal’s answer, their shared pain always being close at hand for Hannibal, jealously guarded between his ribs.

Will grunts, ugly and wet, wipes his hand roughly over his nose and mouth, spitefully returning the same hand to tangle as best in can in Hannibal’s hair. He feels Hannibal’s smile quirk, inappropriately exasperated and fond, into his thigh. He tugs hard on those dreadfully short strands.

“You  _ know  _ what I mean, you bastard. You - you fucking  _ know  _ what I’m asking.” The words are halfway between a plea and rage, and Will knows how they feel, knows that knife-edge beneath the feet. “Loving me, knowing that I’m going to have the - the fucking  _ audacity _ to die one day. Knowing that the only way to keep me safe and yours forever is to consume me.” 

He rests his dread-numb lips against Hannibal’s temple, parted enough to breathe in the taste him, and tries not to choke on his love. “Knowing that neither of us would survive that?”

In the space between the words, air leaves his lungs in great heaving, painful gasps while it stills completely in Hannibal’s. As though Will had finally closed his mouth over Hannibal’s, had taken all the sea-damp, coppery breath from him and swallowed it greedily, desperately into himself.

Will doesn’t remember what Molly’s kisses had tasted like on their honeymoon. 

He won’t forget the feeling of Hannibal’s breath gently gusting against his thigh, the warmth and slight unevenness of it so painfully intimate that Will tightens his grip in that unstyled hair and holds onto those few scant inches as if it might keep his whole world from upending, crushed under their own weight.

“You always were a greedy boy at heart, weren’t you Will?” 

In his mind’s eye, he can see the glittering, quiet motes of joy on Hannibal’s gentle, ragged exhale, and it feels like being baptised after the sea refused Will’s sacrifice, offered them birth instead.

Hannibal barely registers that Will is tugging as viciously, as hard as he possibly can against the unbearably short strands of his hair. 

“Consuming you can only ever confine you within the walls of my memory palace, Will. You have gifted us a rebirth, and so we must find ways of surviving together, each outside of the other.”

Hannibal slowly rises from where he had curled his head in Will’s lap, willingly and what must have been terribly uncomfortably. Will lets him, fingers closing anxiously around the hair he can’t release.

“We can’t do that if I hide you away inside myself.” Soft and painfully, shamelessly fond, spoken gently into Will’s ear, which Hannibal carefully bares to his attentions by tucking one dirty curl behind it. When Will allows himself to turn and meet Hannibal’s gaze, it is warm and rueful. 

He glares at Hannibal, forces himself not to blink, and the resulting tears join the salt-stickiness already stinging the dragon-wound on his cheek. He doesn’t care, clicks his jaw to dislodge the tears that become trapped in the torn flesh but remains in place, wound so tightly as he scours Hannibal’s movements for any stray twitch that might denote the intent to disentangle. His fingers tighten their hold in his hair, cupping either side of his head, and Hannibal’s hands come up to bracket Will’s own to bolster the possession.

Once upright, Hannibal stills, allows them both to simply sit in what they’re surrendering, heads pressed together while they share the metallic air of rebirth between their open mouths.

Hannibal’s head held by both of them, St John and Salome caught in an endless cycle of taking and offering. 

Offering up the last piece of himself, shining and jagged beneath the pulpy redness that Hannibal had gouged out in his effort to relinquish this thing to Will, and Will feels the first feather-light sting of  _ something  _ that could be hope.

It had been the only way that Hannibal knew how to love and protect, and if he could give it up, could grasp the tines strengthened by years of conviction and twist and sweat and  _ force  _ them into a new shape, then perhaps Will could too. Perhaps they didn’t have to fall on the swords they have made together.

Will slides his head down to press into Hannibal’s warm, unshaven neck, reversing their positions and forcing the man to cradle him close, though it was an imposition that Hannibal accepted like a gift. Will felt fingers close around his hair and squeeze in a soothing, palpating kind of rhythm, not heavy enough to overwhelm his spitting, blazing senses, but present and soothing enough to assure him that he hasn’t lost the only thing he’s chosen to keep, and Will’s breath shudders gratefully from him.

“You learnt not to want that for me?” he mouths the words into Hannibal’s skin, tries to stifle how tremulous and terrifyingly  _ hopeful _ they are. Closes his eyes and lets himself discover that Hannibal has chest hair and how it feels against his face. Figures he’ll have time enough to be embarrassed about it later, when it doesn’t seem so important to have all every part of Hannibal within his grasp. 

“I learnt that there were things I wanted from you more,” Hannibal murmurs quietly down into Will’s ear, having to chase him a little, because he’s lost to the feeling of smoothing his cheek repetitively against Hannibal’s chest, his throat.

“The desire still lives in me, in those same dark and safe places where I want to keep you. Shh,” he hushes the noise that seeps from between Will’s teeth, cradles his head when Will pressed his mouth even harder to the join between neck and shoulder. “Do not think of it as loss. We sacrifice that warm and distant dream of a life lived inside each other. But in return, we find ourselves a life lived together, outside the walls of memory palaces and perspex boxes.”

Will makes a wounded noise, clenches his hands in Hannibal’s hair, grunts in frustration when he again finds it too short to truly grasp and hold. Hannibal dips his head to allow the exploration, uses the opportunity to speak quiet promises to Will’s ear.

“It is an exchange, and I find that it quiets the loss that surrender brings.”

Will chokes on the assurance, can smell the truth beneath Hannibal’s skin but it doesn’t lessen the pain of having to give up this thing that Hannibal coaxed from the earth of his insides. It has only just begun to flourish, and he knows that he has to give it up to the only man who knows how its roots feel. He settles his face in the crook of Hannibal’s shoulder, gently brings his forehead down against that sturdy muscle once, twice, his eyes squeezed tightly shut. 

He nods. 

And it feels like loss, like prying something out of his own hands but also like one of those rare victories that they can share in together. He draws a deep breath at the soft skin behind Hannibal’s ear, feels his own skin prickle in response to the slight, pleased shiver that Hannibal allows him to feel. 

“I tried to do the polite thing. I tried to refuse the gift, but it wouldn’t go back, and I want it. It’s mine, now.” Will can feel Hannibal’s tender smile breathed proud and warm into his hair. 

He hears himself laugh, like something wet and torn away that’s left a part of itself behind, but it’s  _ free _ .

“We - this is  _ ours _ . It hurts, and it’s been growing in the space where we’ve been separate for so long, and we  _ earned  _ it, and I’m not - I won’t give it back.”

He can hear all the people they’ve left behind uttering a similar refrain, all their colleagues - the ones that are left - coming to work their scene, shuffling as close to their eroding bluff as they dared, peering over the edge and murmuring uneasily, that  _ they got what they deserved, I guess. _

They may be uttering the same prayers, but they’re worshipping entirely different gods. They will say the words with horror and regret and perhaps, at their most generous and when they are alone with their thoughts in the dark, a little doubt.

He will not. 

He releases his grip on Hannibal’s hair and slides both arms around his neck, constricting tighter and closer until he feels Hannibal’s breathing become shallow, thin, but no less calm, pressed against his own gasping, raging breaths.

“Your roiling Atlantic ate us and spat us back out,” he sighs thinly, high and wavering, and it chokes and spits from his throat like brine. “That’s enough. That’s enough.” 

He’s crying, thick and choking like he’s pleading, though the only mercy upon which he can throw himself is his own. Hannibal nods softly and gently to all the words that tumble from his mouth, and Will remains the only one who needs to ask and give permission. It is horrifying.

  
“I’m tired, I’m done. I don’t want hunger to be what binds us.” The words are small and wet, tired against the soft skin behind Hannibal’s ear, and he whispers them there like it’s the only confessional he’s ever known. Hannibal’s arms come up to carefully, ever so gently encircle his taut, trembling form like it’s something not fragile but precious, even as he crushes Hannibal so thoroughly.

“No more hunger between us then,” he warbles, rocking moves his body slowly back and forth until Will allows the gentle rocking motion to ease them back into the tiny, stale bed. 

“No. No more, Hannibal. Swear to me. I want to be - I want to be warm and well-fed.” Will allows Hannibal to lift one arm from around him to reach for the discarded blanket, though he refuses to relinquish his own bruising grip. “Make me forget that there was ever a before you. I want to forget everything that I didn’t choose.” 

***

Sleep is a warm, diaphanous thing that leaves Will as suddenly as it settled over him, when he feels Hannibal’s warmth shift beneath his arm, and he tightens his sleepy hold without mercy or thought.

“It’s alright,” the words are soft and low, but not thick with sleep, and Will cracks one baleful eye open to see Hannibal’s face, ridiculously alert for what must be a terribly early hour if the fragile, watery sunlight is anything to go by.

“I beg to differ. Whatever this hour is, it shouldn’t exist.” He manages to tumble the words down from the back of his tongue, winces at the taste in his mouth. “And I’m fairly sure that my morning breath is deeply upsetting.”

Will feels his arm rise and fall with the soft exhale of Hannibal’s chuckle. He digs his fingers into the spaces between Hannibal’s ribs, just to feel them expand.

“I assure you that morning breath is one of the least distressing odours the human body can produce.” 

The first thought that comes to him, easy and without guilt, is that Hannibal used to be a surgeon. Sometimes he forgets, and it always sends an odd spike of warmth through him whenever Hannibal resumes the mantle, like shrugging on the well-fitting white coat again, as poised and untroubled as though it had never been stripped from him. Will supposes that the clinical boredom with the base and horrifying workings and failings of the human body is unlikely to abandon Hannibal in sympathy with his licence. 

The realisation that it must be so much easier to peel back those human failings to new depths of nose-wrinkling baseness when one is unhampered by the hippocratic oath, comes late and with surprisingly little distress. Will sees the two opposing yet intimately connected visions of Hannibal flash through his mind, two sides of a polished coin spinning so rapidly that both seem to become one single, shining point of light on the back of his eyelids. He accepts the beauty of it with nothing more than a small, wet sigh that he hides in Hannibal’s throat.

“I think you’re probably more tolerant of my scent than I am,” Will mumbles into the warm, sweat-salty skin of Hannibal’s neck, uncaring of his rank hypocrisy as he takes a deep, slow breath. 

“Always sniffing me like I was one of your wines you’d pried open to aerate,” Will mumbles, nosing himself insistently further down Hannibal’s chest, appreciative of the way he turns to give Will easier access. Hannibal’s arms come to wrap around Will’s back in that welcoming embrace as Will, with a faint shadow of disgust with himself, presses his face into the crease where chest becomes armpit and allows himself to simply breathe there for a while.

Molly had done this to him a couple of times. He had squirmed the first time, tried instinctively and gently to redirect her, surprise lancing through him at what was surely just bad aim on her part. He had lain stiffly, self-conscious and awkward on the bed all those subsequent times, after she had laughed softly and assured him that this was where she had intended to be. Felt like a piece of shit when he couldn’t understand the appeal, when the thought of reciprocating didn’t provoke even the faintest stirrings of arousal or comfort.

“You know that was really weird and rude, right?” Will smiles with teeth against the soft skin of Hannibal’s armpit, feels the man’s amused rumble mingle with the steady beat of his heart and closes his eyes, allows himself to be lulled. “For other people, that might have been a huge red flag, you know?”

“It wouldn’t be something that I typically encourage in polite society, I admit,” Hannibal drawls calmly, petting Will’s flank as he settles himself into this new way that they fit together. “But I was fairly confident that those two concepts never held much weight with you. Nor those red flags that you seemed so taken by. Not something to shy from, but rather irresistible threads, fluttering in the corners of your vision. Things to take up and pull, to follow their unwinding to their inevitable conclusion.”

“Takes one to know one?” Will hopes that Hannibal feels him raise his eyebrow.

“If you must.”

Will smirks, oddly satisfied with the answer, and allows himself to drift, pressed here against Hannibal, content to surrender to all the differing shades of red thread which they have each tugged and followed and wound around themselves, swapping and crossing their strings until there’s nothing left for them to be but this, together.

“I confess that your scent is one of the things that I missed most during my time under Alana’s care.”

The words are soft and more thoughtful than anything else, but Will knows how to hear the notes that Hannibal chooses not to play, and the pain lances through him, bright and familiar like a new blade in an old wound. His belly clenches and his hand darts up to fist as much of Hannibal’s hair as he can.

“Don’t talk about her,” it comes out far more a guttural plea than the hiss they formed inside his mind and behind his itching teeth, and he yanks once at Hannibal’s hair to make up for it. 

“She’ll never be here, and I’ll never be anywhere else. You made ever so sure of that, didn’t you?” Will’s lip curls and he presses his teeth against Hannibal’s ear, wants to break the skin and poison his blood with his promise. “She won’t fit where I do, no matter how much you tried to pretend, once.”

Hannibal tightens his hold around Will’s shoulders, though it’s far too reverent and gentle to be anything close to censure.

“She didn’t know what she had,” Will hisses, unmollified by the knowing pressure of Hannibal’s hold, nor the rhythmic stroke of hands over his back, and this time the words succeed in their quest for venom, hissing between his teeth like the flash before the thunder.

“And what did she have, Will?” The words are dragged deeply and from so far back in Hannibal’s throat that they seem almost tremulous to Will, who wants no such alien frailty to tinge his own words, to be mistaken for uncertainty.

“Something of  _ mine. _ ”

There will be no more lies, no more wasteful obfuscations. Will is so sick of waste.

Hannibal’s hands still in their soothing, covetous paths, his whole body seeming to slip into the calm and utter stillness that Will remembers so well from when Randall Tier had finally gentled between his thighs. Sometimes Will regrets that he and Hannibal could only have shared such a gift by proxy at the time, their skin so hot to each other’s touch that they would only have consumed each other had they not had Randall’s beautiful savagery as their go-between. Will hopes that his gift to Randall was everything he had ever hoped for.

And whatever period of peace seemed to come over Hannibal is apparently easily consumed, as all his previously lax muscles coil and tense as if he and Will have kindled flames together, like this, two soaked flints still managing to catch alight in a way that Randall never could. 

Hannibal’s arms rise to do more than gently circle Will’s waist - they constrict around Will, fingers biting into Will’s bruised skin like huge teeth, and Will thinks for a moment that they may have made a mistake after all, because his skin  _ burns  _ with the same sick lurch of victory, of the painful brightness that comes with  _ sight _ , just as it had with Randall, except this is so much brighter and Will wonders whether they are destined to survive each other after all. It’s so much sweeter than he ever could have imagined, and it  _ hurts. _

“ _ Say something,  _ god damn you,” he curses Hannibal as he digs his fingers in the spaces between his ribs, winds his arms as far around that solid chest as he possibly can and squeezes with all the strength he can find. Seeks out the softest part of Hannibal’s shoulder and bites down hard because he  _ needs  _ to know.

“I fear that words will be...inadequate.” And he  _ does  _ sound like he’s struggling to dredge even those spindly, naked words up from a ruined throat. He can almost hear the crumbling walls of a room twisting in on itself and reshaping its very foundations, Will is going to give him that, but -

“Fucking  _ try _ . You never struggled before. Always ready with an obscure quote or a withering quip or a - a fucking  _ cannibalism pun,  _ you fucking - wretched creature.” Will’s lips are wet and feel too loose around his rage, not enough room in his mouth with the wound and his love to contain too much rage, and it’s coming tumbling out whether he wants it to or not, and he’s just a little breathless with it, whether he wants to be or not. “All those goddamn letters after your name and you’re telling me you don’t have any words now? For  _ me?  _ Try harder, Hannibal, or I swear, I will leave you with Chiyoh as soon as it’s safe to dock. I’ve given you everything, and you  _ will give me this.” _

A warm breath of laughter trickles through Will’s hair to play at his scalp, in such contrast to the cold sea air that seeps into their cabin that it makes Will feel like there have been pieces of himself floating loose and sharp inside him, stray fragments of bone that have finally found the spaces that have been carved out for them.

“I am yours. My world is only as big as the space that you occupy, Will.” 

His breath - all that love and rage and coppery air - leaves him abruptly. 

And he is going to have to  _ heartily  _ disagree with the assertion that words could ever be inadequate when wielded by Hannibal, because they embed immediately in his skin, sink down low between his ribs and soak into his bones, and he can  _ hear  _ the raw, chapped  _ honesty  _ in Hannibal’s voice and it feels like it’s killing him just a little. He swallows and it almost gets caught in his throat - of all the things Hannibal has ever given him,  _ words _ turn out to be the hardest things to swallow. Words that he has wanted to hear for longer than he can make sense of.

And then Hannibal tilts Will’s head up with one terribly light touch of forefinger under chin, and Will doesn’t know whether it’s suddenly become easier to breathe or if he’s just accepted the drowning, but either way his whole body goes lax and calm against Hannibal, who smiles crookedly as he shores Will’s weight up with his own body, leans down to inhale against the soft skin behind Will’s ear.

“Smaller than the box in which Alana kept me for you, safe and secure, unsealed until such a time that profane fingers came reaching for me again.”

Will keens softly, the vulnerable skin of his throat working against the feather-light touch of Hannibal’s finger, which moves gently back and forth while Will tries to breathe through the crashing of the waves that he’d thought they’d left behind. 

_ Profane fingers. His own, reaching out to press against the glass separating him from Hannibal, and even his pithy remark about rejection can’t hide their reaching. Fingers sure of their purpose, for the first time since it was too late. No more hovering tentatively about the air around the box. Eager to tear it open, to take everything out and commit to their play, finally, after years of staring at the shelf. _

Will can’t speak, his throat sore and full, his chest shuddering like it forgot how to draw the words in from the air, and Hannibal presses a gentle kiss against his forehead. Rests one of those large, incongruously graceful hands on Will’s chest. “There is far greater freedom in living behind your ribcage than there ever was in a clear cell with small holes.”

“I’m sorry,” Will chokes out, and it’s guttural and wet and everything that he had once wanted to hide from Hannibal, punching its way out of his mouth, and Will is sure he’ll be left with empty fragments in his teeth. “I swore I’d never be sorry for you, for any of it. I fucking swore.”

He presses his face against that solid chest and smears his indignity against Hannibal’s warmth, his chest hair, hopes it seeps through to that monstrously steady heart and takes root there.

“That’s just one more thing that you’ve taken from me.” His eyelashes brush wetly against Hannibal’s chest hair. “That promise is yours like all the rest, because I’m -” he sighs, inhales the warmth of Hannibal’s sweat, suddenly so tired and it feels like everything is five years overdue. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” 

Hannibal holds Will’s head to his chest as though he might starve and twist to dust before his eyes if left to his own devices. He digs his fingernails deep into the flesh of Hannibal’s pectoral -  _ not like it was, not like it was  _ \- hoping to convey to Hannibal what would happen were he to let go, and to convince himself that he had never  _ actually  _ seen Hannibal naked before, and thus had nothing to compare it to, no real sense of before and after, no right to this sudden, impertinent grief.

“You lost weight.”

Hannibal tucks Will’s head beneath his chin, and the only thing that stops Will from feeling like a baby being hushed is the single, thoughtful stroke of one of those large hands down over his hair.

"The BSHCI complies with regulations regarding inmates’ nutritional requirements. However, loss of muscle mass is to be expected with long-term incarceration.”

It hits Will like a rotting, heavy lump sliding down his throat to slosh in his belly. It aches like something needing to be lanced, and he can barely stand the flickering of the two sides of this particular coin, dancing in front of his vision.

Hannibal, dressed in his best, dark and sharp in all the right angles, hair coiffed and smile generous, satisfied,  _ content _ , as he presents his tableau of beautiful hedonism to rapturous guests. As he listens to Will pace and spit and rave in his kitchen, nodding and tilting his head quietly as Will gradually calms down, accepts whatever small menial task Hannibal hands to him. The quiet sense of happiness swirling around his kitchen as they settle down at the island, so terribly informal and intimate, and watch each other take pleasure in such an intimate thing.

Hannibal, stripped of his suits, dressed in a thin, rough, jumpsuit woven through with the old sweat of hundreds of former inmates, and oh god, Hannibal could probably smell it  _ all -  _

Hannibal, not forced to eat with the other residents of the BSHCI but alone, in the washed-out, stale light of his cell. No conversation perhaps save Alana’s occasional barbs, and even that too full of dull anger to be stimulating.

Eating from those fucking battered plastic trays with the neat compartments for each food group, with the harsh corners that never seemed to be properly cleaned of yesterday’s meal. Eating the food that so obviously came from powder, from cans, that had been over-boiled because the inmates in the kitchen don’t give a fuck, and so long as nobody got scurvy, neither did Alana. 

Nutrients, bare fuel in the bare minimum, the same rotation every week, for months and years. 

“I never wanted that. I never  _ wanted it. _ ” 

He feels his hand, clawed and trembling, shift down to Hannibal’s belly. Finds the slightly soft paunch there. For some reason, the feeling of that softness evokes a keenly aching pain in his own belly. His had never managed to grow the slight paunch that he knew Molly had always wanted -  _ “if the way to a man’s heart really was through his stomach, I think I’d be insulted by now”.  _ He had flinched if she ever made to round the joke off by patting his stomach. Had let her think it was because his scar pained him, somehow. She had never needed to know that it was the best of them, that it wasn’t for her. 

Will shifts his hand over to his own stomach before he’s even aware that he’s doing it. Traces the smile that Hannibal had left him with, wanting quickly to return back to petting at Hannibal’s belly but suddenly struck with how intimate the gesture seemed. 

“I almost came to see you, so many times before that day.” He whispers because the words feel like they might break into sharp pieces otherwise, and he doesn't quite trust himself with them. "Alana...she never said a word, but - she made me afraid. Afraid of seeing you like that. Afraid of knowing for certain that I couldn't stand it."

It had hurt to see Hannibal there, standing as upright as graceful as ever, dignity still pulled tightly around him like the fine suits had never been pulled from him. And yet they had tried so hard to do so, to strip him of it along with everything else, and  _ that _ had showed, like scars from a surgery. The wounds had closed, but the faint white ridges showed everyone what they had tried so hard to remove.

“I know about the promise you made her. It was the only thing that came to mind whenever she spoke to me about you.” He speaks quietly, chooses his words carefully, picking through them like they’re all new and unexplored even to him. An overgrown path that he had always been careful never to go down until now.

Hannibal stills against him, and Will hadn’t even realised just how much movement, how much slow slide of skin on skin and soft whisper of breath against hair had been lulling him until the moment that it all softly vanished. Irrationally, he felt his face flush at the realisation that he had been sitting, so willingly vulnerable, and allowing this man to caress every stray limb and errant curl.

If there was ever going to be a man he could do this with, he supposes as he feels Hannibal’s lips quirk against his temple, it was only ever going to be this one. It seems a distant, filmy strangeness to him now, to think of the few hours he had spent at the beginning of their acquaintance, worrying about what it meant that his thoughts kept straying so consistently back to this odd older man, with a keenness that was at once familiar and alien in shape.

He feels Hannibal lift his head and prop it over his other shoulder, dragging his rough, unshaven cheek against Will’s hair, allowing the softer strands to get caught and pull ever so gently through his stubble. Will makes a soft sound, small appreciation for the simple, strange physicality. 

“Poor Alana, always seeking a confidant in strange bedfellows,” Hannibal opines softly, smile sharp and crooked. His eyes glitter with something that finds a mate in Will, something sharp and beautiful which forces Will’s stomach to settle and his heart to pound with something he’d never felt standing in a stream and waiting for the fish to come to him. “She was afraid of you. Did you know that?”

“Is that what that was?” Still not above casting a little bait, and from the wry quirk of lips he receives, Hannibal knows it, knows the shape of the hook beneath the soft, pleasantly wriggling gift. “I always thought it was garden-variety guilt.”

“Fishing for compliments, Will?” He ignores the glare that Will sends his way, simply dips his head to whisper into Will’s ear. 

“If you were afraid of what you would see if you set eyes on me, Alana was terrified. I made sure to mention you as often as possible.”

Will leans back into the circle of Hannibal’s arms, lets the man tilt his head a little to the left, the better to inspect the rapid play of emotions flitter across Will’s face like sunlight beneath the waves.

“She knew I wouldn’t want to intervene.” The words are soft and lilting slightly upward, thought it wasn’t a true question. Nevertheless, Hannibal hums affirmative as he watches the beautiful things behind Will’s eyes shift restlessly.

“I intervened that night, when we were supposed to leave.” He clenches his jaw, allows the pain from the dragon-wound to be the spur in the side of his anger. “She had her chance to need my help, and I didn’t realise it at the time, tried every fucking day for years not to think about it, but she used it that night. I called backup for her, and then it was...it was gone. There was - there was nothing  _ left there  _ between us, like a thread that snapped.”

He chokes, and it sounds like mourning and feels like sleep after a long day. Hannibal’s hand moves down his flank, slow and heavy and calming, and nobody else had ever done it quite hard enough to settle him.

“God, I hated you for doing that to her. For - for hurting her, for making me choose. For giving her that chance that she  _ wasted. _ ”

“A chance to be blind.”

Will grunts, shifts fractiously beneath the thin, dusty sheet until Hannibal withdraws his arms from around Will, leaving him flopped uselessly against his chest as he slowly props them both upright. Will takes the opportunity to roll himself over so that he’s no longer sitting almost directly on top of Hannibal, but can rest very carefully against the man’s injured side, can look up into the face that turns to look so gently down at him.

“I used to wish she had been blind.” Will doesn’t take his eyes off Hannibal’s, though he raises a battered hand to paw unsteadily at the short, uneven choppiness of Hannibal’s fringe. Hannibal allows the touch before gently catching Will’s hand in his own, probably out of some distant instinct for self-preservation, because Will’s hand shakes like it’s trying desperately to catch something slipping through his fingers.

“But then when I saw you again that day, I felt...I was relieved. I was so fucking relieved that you had made that promise, because there was nothing else that I could -” Will stops himself before he’s unable to go on, snorting wet and angry. Hannibal smooths his fingers over Will’s knuckles, doesn’t protest when Will latches back onto those uneven strands of hair that barely brush Hannibal’s forehead.

“She tried to take everything, didn’t she?” He tries not to make it too tender, fails judging by the slight tightening of the corners of Hannibal’s mouth. “She took your clothes and your food and your - your  _ toilet _ , Hannibal, don’t think I don’t know about that. She took your  _ hair _ and there was almost nothing left for me by the time I got there, and I can’t forgive her for that.”

The stiffening of Hannibal’s limbs is slow and gradual, like bones breaking and realigning, because he is a prideful and upright creature, and it is pride that has allowed him to stand so beautiful and tall as much as it has allowed people like Alana to force a small fragment of torn fingernail into his armour, and Will isn’t sure which of them to curse more for it. He takes pleasure in the knowledge that Alana would never have noticed the change in posture, no matter how many times Hannibal took her to his bed. 

He turns inside the circle of Hannibal’s arms, allows himself to catalogue and then enjoy how different this feels to holding a woman in his arms. He lets his body grow heavy as he looks up at Hannibal, allows himself for what feels like the first time to actually look at his face, without shame or concern for what people might see reflected in his own eyes. He reaches his hand up again to rub Hannibal’s choppy fringe between his thumb and forefinger. 

“Don’t ask me to visit her, Hannibal.” His throat feels thin and brittle when he leans his head further back, to fully absorb the murky light that roils in Hannibal’s eyes as he blinks softly down at Will. “We can’t afford to be reckless, and  _ I _ couldn’t be anything else.”

His words feel thick and heavy as he swallows, making room for them. Hannibal lifts one forefinger to stroke ever so gently down the column of his throat, like one would pill a dog.

“I don’t think I can control myself, Hannibal. Do it for me.” He juts his jaw forward, lets his eyes soften in a pristine reflection of a broken moment, finally fixed and polished to perfection. “Please.”

**Author's Note:**

> Heads up, the next chapter is going to go into much more depth with the hair obsession, so....get ready for that?
> 
> Also I apologise that the chapter title is a TLOU2 reference, it has nothing to do with this but I couldn't stop myself.


End file.
